Your Multi-Agent System Is a Distributed System. Treat It Like One

The article argues that multi-agent AI systems inherit the same failure modes as distributed systems, including retries, duplicate execution, stale state, and partial failures. Rather than relying on better prompts or larger models, it advocates proven engineering patterns such as idempotency keys, durable queues, bounded retries, outbox tables, and saga-based compensation to build reliable production-grade agent systems.